WEB GIS BASED REAL-TIME ESCAPE ROUTE PLANNING

Abstract

Nowadays, Disasters are unavoidable. Frequencies of Disasters are very high. India is a country with a population of approximately 1 .25 billion, as population increases force to use areas sensitive to disaster. Natural hazards (i.e. earthquakes, floods, landslides etc) turn into disaster when they hit the man-made environment that causes lives and properties loss. Due to increase in frequency and intensity of natural disasters the proper disaster mitigation and management planning is inevitable. Disaster cannot be stopped but it can be minimized to take better decision making during disaster. To effectively reduce the impact of various disasters by availability of spatial data this helps the managers for better decision-making at the time of disaster. Geographical Information System (GIS) can play a very important role to support spatial planning for disaster management as a powerful tool for collecting, storing, analyzing, modelling and displaying large amount of data. Designing a GIS to distribute geospatial information on a network such as Web, gives an opportunity to the managers to easy decision making to get the information about disaster any time and any where they are. Web GIS Decision Support System for Disaster Management enables timely insights, better communication thus making the information rapidly available for better preparedness and action. Preparedness and mitigation for disasters are very useful to face disaster effectively i.e. minimize loss of life and property cause by disaster. During any disaster, response, rescue and relief operation are also important phase of disaster management to reduce the effects of disaster. These operations are critical when all the existing transportation system get damaged due to disaster. In that case, most of victim trapped in disaster hit areas resulting increased casualities. For immediate rescue and relief, escape routes play a major role to evacuate victims from disaster affected areas to safe places. In this study, real-time escape routes are generated and access on Web for evacuation purposes. The real-time escape routes can be generating by using Model builder in ArcG1S with various parameters and linked on Web using open source tool like Openlayers and Geoserver etc. All generated escape routes can be easily used as walk able paths and to evacuate victim to safe places during worst circumstances in order to reduce casualities and the impact of disaster.